Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Where do visitors go on Ancestry.com?

The web information company, www.alexa.com, provides some indication of the subdomains used by visitors to a web site.

For instance, for www.ancestry.com, Alexa provides the following percentages for these sub-domains:

* search.ancestry.com - 41% (this is the subdomain when you click on a match in a database)

* trees.ancestry.com - 28% (this is the subdomain when you click on your own, or someone else's, family tree)

* ancestry.com - 15% (this is the main domain where you start a search)

* content.ancestry.com - 9% (this is the subdomain when you click on a specific database from a menu to get a list of matches)

* boards.ancestry.com - 3% (this is the message board subdomain - you get to it from the main ancestry page by clicking on the Community tab)

* secure.ancestry.com - 1% (this the personal account page - you can get to it from the My Account link)

* awtc.ancestry.com - 1% (this is one of the Ancestry World Tree pages - you can get to it only by clicking on a match in Ancestry World Tree)

* awt.ancestry.com - 1% (this is also one of the Ancestry World Tree pages - you can get to it only by clicking on a match in Ancestry World Tree)

* rootsweb.ancestry.com - 1% (this is the main Rootsweb page - I don't think you can get to it from the main Ancestry page).

Those total up to 100% - they're probably rounded off a bit. It's interesting that the subdomains dna.ancestry.com, learn.ancestry.com, landing.ancestry.com, ancestrypress.ancestry.com and store.ancestry.com don't register on the list.

What can we figure out from the statistics? If we assume that these are page views, then:

* 28% are associated with family trees submitted to One World Tree, Personal Member Trees and Public Member Trees. Only 2% are associated with Ancestry World Tree for some reason (I think that AWT is much easier to navigate and use than the others, and contains much of the same information as the others). I'm surprised that this number is so high. It may be inflated because you have to click many times to find useful information on a family line in OWT and PMT.

* 41% are associated with actual searches in databases - results from a search request and the search results, including the database images. I'm surprised that this number is this low.

* 9% (Content) is associated with finding a specific database - but you have to do it from specific web pages, like the What's New list, the Card Catalog and the New Database list. I'm surprised that this number is as high as it is.

* Only 3% are for the Message Boards and only 1% for the Rootsweb main page and subpages. My opinion was that these percentages would be higher once Rootsweb came into the Ancestry domain. I usually use the WorldConnect database through Rootsweb (the subdomain would be wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com) and not through Ancestry Trees. Since it's free, I thought that this would have much more traffic than the Ancestry World Tree (also free) subdomains on Ancestry.

It's not clear what the time frame is for these statistics. If it's the last three months or more, they may be skewed by the use of the Rootsweb domain before April.

What are you surprised by in this list? How do you analyze this?

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